More Book Lust: Recommended Reading for Every Mood, Moment, and Reason
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Then there are his books for adults. Turtle Diary is a tender (but not soppy or sappy) love story about two lonely people who come together in an effort to free the turtles at the London Zoo (it was also made into a not-half-bad film).
Riddley Walker, set after a nuclear war has destroyed the world, is one of the best of the postapocalyptic genre of novels. I don’t know of another novel that could arguably be called science fiction which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award as well as the Nebula Award (for best science fiction novel). If you have trouble deciphering the language of the novel (which Hoban invented), do as my mother did and read it aloud—you’ll then find it reasonably easy (mostly) to figure out.
Her Name Was Lola is a wonderfully quirky novel about a writer (who bears more than a passing resemblance to Hoban) in the midst of a midlife crisis, who can’t quite make up his mind between the woman he loves (Lola) and the other woman he sort of loves too (Lula Mae). An invisible dwarf named Apasmara (“forgetfulness” in Hindu mythology) advises him on his dilemma.
A HOLIDAY SHOPPING LIST
Friends and family (no matter what their age) know that when they get a gift from me, it’s sure to be a book. Here’s my recent holiday shopping list.
For Uncle Sol, who loves books with maps in them: Katharine Harmon’s You Are Here: Personal Geographies and Other Maps of the Imagination
For Stephen, who reads The New Yorker and loves cartoons: The Party, After You Left byy New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast
For Donnie, who yearns for the simple life: Better Off: Pulling the Switch on Technology by Eric Brende
For Arnie, who loves to visit New York City: Ross Wetzsteon’s Republic of Dreams: Greenwich Village: The American Bohemia, 1910-1960, and Russell Shorto’s The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan, the Forgotten Colony That Shaped America
For Louis, who is interested in both Buddhism and physics: Arthur Zajonc’s The New Physics and Cosmology: Dialogues with the Dalai Lama
For Jen and Jan, who both love chick-lit novels: The Big Love by Sarah Dunn and The Other Side of the Story by Marian Keyes
For Marilyn, who loves to cook: Ian Kelly’s Cooking for Kings: The Life of Antonin Carême,the First Celebrity Chef
For Tomese, who loves literary fiction: Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America
For Clare, who’s looking for her spiritual path: Sue Bender’s Plain and Simple: A Woman’s Journey to the Amish
For Neal, who loves funny British novels: Snobs by Julian Fellowes
For Sarah, age three:Tell Me a Mitzi by Lore Segal
For Maria, who loves poetry: Mary Oliver’s A Poetry Handbook and New and Selected Poems
For cousin Brian, who loves historical novels: The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters by Robert Lewis Taylor
For Anand, who loves wine: The Accidental Connoisseur: An Irreverent Journey Through the Wine World by Lawrence Osborne
For Millie, who loves quirky novels: The Spirit Cabinet by Paul Quarrington
For Peter, who wants to laugh more: Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim by David Sedaris
For Craig, who loves baseball novels: Waiting for Teddy Williams by Howard Frank Mosher and The Celebrant by Eric Rolfe Greenberg
For Emily, age one: Roll Over!: A Counting Song by Merle Peek
For Andra, who loves tennis: Bruce Schoenfeld’s The Match: Althea Gibson & Angela Buxton: How Two Outsiders—One Black, the Other Jewish—Forged a Friendship and Made Sports History
For Bill, who loves films: Spike,Mike, Slackers & Dykes: A Guided Tour Across a Decade of American Independent Cinema by John Pierson
For Andy, the architect: The Feud That Sparked the Renaissance: How Brunelleschi and Ghiberti Changed the Art World by Robert Paul Walker
For Joe, who likes to read about the stories behind the headlines: Endless Enemies: The Making of an Unfriendly World by Jonathan Kwitny
For Susan, who loves books about dysfunctional families: A Hole in the World: An American Boyhood by Richard Rhodes
For Charley and Beth, the birders: Brushed by Feathers: A Year of Birdwatching in the West buy Frances Wood
For Beth, the textile designer: Victoria Finlay’s Color: A Natural History of the Palette
For Alice, who is interested in exploring her Jewish roots: Eva Hoffman’s Shtetl: The Life and Death of a Small Town and the World of the Polish Jews
For David, who eats, sleeps, and dreams golf: George Plimpton’s The Bogey Man: A Month on the PGA Tour and The Greatest Game Ever Played: Harry Vardon, Frances Ouimet, and the Birth of Modern Golf by Mark Frost
For Jon, who wants to know everything about everything: The Experts’ Guide to 100 Things Everyone Should Know How to Do, created by Samantha Ettus, with sections on “How to Wash Your Hands,” “How to Shovel Snow” (by the mayor of Buffalo, NewYork), “How to Relax,” “How to Give and Receive a Compliment,” and ninety-six more gems of advice
For cousin Lynda, the psychologist: Secrets, Lies,Betrayals:The Body/Mind Connection by Maggie Scarf
HONG KONG HOLIDAYS
I think that the main reason I’ve always loved reading about Hong Kong is because years ago I was lucky enough to stumble across the Yellowthread Street mysteries of William Marshall (who was described on the cover as “living in a modest castle in Ireland,” which thoroughly delighted me). The first books in this series were published in the 1970s, and though Hong Kong has changed significantly since then, especially since the 1997 transfer from British to Chinese hands, some essential elements remain the same. Hong Kong’s polyglot society comes across vividly in these often very funny police procedurals starring Detective Chief Inspector Harry Feiffer and his colleagues Spencer, Auden, and O’Yee. They’re sometimes hard to find, but worth looking for (especially if you enjoyed the television show Barney Miller) at libraries, in used bookstores, or over the Internet. Start with the first, Yellowthread Street,butdon’tmiss Skulduggery or War Machine.
One of the best novels to read if you want a strong sense of the history (from 1935 on) of contemporary Hong Kong is John Lanchester’s Fragrant Harbor. (The title is the literal translation of the Chinese name of the former British crown colony.) This story is indeed worthy of the adjective “sweeping.” It’s a good choice for anyone who enjoyed Colleen McCullough’s The Thorn Birds or other sagas of that ilk.
The Language of Threads,Gail Tsukiyama’s sequel to her much-loved Women of the Silk, follows one of her earlier characters as she travels to Hong Kong and gets caught up in the terrible experience of the Japanese occupation during World War II.
It’s easy to find good guidebooks to Hong Kong, as well as lots of history books, but it’s harder to find compulsively readable armchair travel books about the country. Here are two, and it’s no surprise that one is by that consummate traveler Jan Morris. Called simply Hong Kong, it’s filled with facts as well as evocative writing. The other is Travelers’ Tales Guides: Hong Kong: True Stories of Life on the Road, edited by James O’Reilly et al., part of a reliable series of well-written books about many different countries. In its more than fifty personal essays, written by authors as diverse as Paul Theroux, Simon Winchester, and Pico Iyer as well as lesser-known writers, you get a great introduction to everything Hong Kong—from food to language to sights and scenes of a search for the perfect pig.
HORROR FOR SISSIES
The trick to reading in the horror genre for those (like me) who tend to be squeamish is to stay safely within the boundaries of the spooky and not venture into the truly boundaries of the spooky and not venture into the truly scary.Thus, creature books are usually safe bets, as most readers can convince themselves that either (a) they would never be in a position to be attacked by such a creature or (b) the creature could not really exist. Safely reassured that mayhem could not be wreaked on their world, readers can then gleefully read about others’ doom. Both the Romantics and the Victorians were great at spooky writing, and the conventions of their day kept
the gore at bay, so among them you’ll find some fine choices.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein is more an exploration of humanity than a story of a monster. The real question the novel asks is, who is the monster? And the answer is more upsetting than scary.
The short story “The Cask of Amontillado” by Edgar Allan Poe is psychological horror at its best, as Poe tells the story of a man who takes revenge in the most chilling of ways.
The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde is a true Victorian nightmare, in which Dorian sells his soul to keep his youth and hide his evil ways.
John Harwood’s The Ghost Writer is the (just bearably) scary tale of a man obsessed with a century-old ghost story written by his great-grandmother, and with an email correspondent who refuses to let him meet her in person.
In a twist on just who or what defines horror, Robert Neville finds himself in a world overrun by vampires, where he must fight during the day and hide at night in order to survive, in IAm Legend by Richard Matheson, a contemporary classic.
Relic by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child is the ultimate creature horror novel, set in the spooky halls of the American Museum of Natural History in New York.
I AM WOMAN—HEAR ME ROAR
Many people find this particular phrase—from a 1973 Grammy Award-winning song by Helen Reddy—rather corny, but you’ll find that the books described in this section are anything but. The voice of women’s liberation in the 1970s was distinct, loud, and clear. Such modern pioneers of the women’s movement as Simone de Beauvoir (The Second Sex, published in 1952), Betty Friedan (The Feminine Mystique, which came out in 1963), and the authors of the now-classic Our Bodies, Ourselves (a seminal work that in 1969 urged women to take control of their own bodies) had a revolutionary impact on our society.
The political became personal with the release of a number of feminist novels by young women in the late 1960s and early 1970s, including Diary of a Mad Housewife by Sue Kaufman, the comic story of an unhappy woman married to an overbearing and priggish husband; Sheila Ballantyne’s tale of a suburban carpooling mother of three who lives simultaneously in both real and imaginary worlds, Norma Jean the Termite Queen; Up the Sandbox!,Anne Roiphe’s tale of Margaret Reynolds, another conflicted housewife balancing fantasy and reality; the sardonic Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen by Alix Kates Shulman, which tells the story of Sasha Davis, the ex- prom queen who questions her all-American-girl background; and Erica Jong’s revolutionary Fear of Flying, which broke many barriers with its account of uninhibited heroine Isadora Wing’s desire for freedom.
Other groundbreaking novels were Fay Weldon’s Female Friends; Margaret Atwood’s Lady Oracle (my favorite Atwood novel, about a woman trying to leave her old life behind); Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time; Lois Gould’s Such Good Friends (in which a woman re-evaluates her life after her husband falls into a coma and she discovers that he’s been chronically unfaithful to her); and the feminist science-fiction novel The Kin of Ata Are Waiting for You by Dorothy Bryant. Although I already wrote, in Book Lust, about Marilyn French’s The Women’s Room (which a friend of mine took to the hospital with her in 1978 when she was about to give birth to her first child), it too fits well in this section.
Other influential political books from the early 1970s were Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch, Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex:The Case for Feminist Revolution, and Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics.
Even thoughts about motherhood underwent a sea change during this period. Both Adrienne Rich’s Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution and Jane Lazarre’s The Mother Knot were published in 1976.
Clearly, a lot of women were thinking a lot about their place in society and what it meant to be female. And even though it has been more than thirty years since many of these books were published, they remain as fresh and insightful as when they first came out.
IDAHO: AND NARY A POTATO TO BE SEEN
Pete Fromm is probably best known for his novels (How All This Started and As Cool as I Am—neither set in Idaho), but the intensity and honesty of Indian Creek Chronicles: A Winter Alone in the Wilderness are striking, as he describes the winter he spent working in the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness, checking up on the state of salmon eggs for the Idaho Department of Fish and Game in 1990 after he had dropped out of college.
Native Idahoan Vardis Fisher wrote a series of sprawling autobiographical novels (often compared to Thomas Wolfe’s equally expansive You Can’t Go Home Again) set during the early twentieth century in the mountains of Idaho; the series begins with In Tragic Life and continues with Passions Spin the Plot,We Are Betrayed, and No Villain Need Be.
Melanie Rae Thon’s Iona Moon is the story of a young woman’s attempt to escape from the poverty and sadness of White Falls, the small town where she’s been stuck her whole life.
Thomas Savage usually set his novels in Montana, but The Sheep Queen (originally published with the much more evocative title I Heard My Sister Speak My Name) is about Emma Russell Sweringen, the matriarch of an Idaho sheep-ranching family, her daughter, and her grandchildren.
Tom Spanbauer’s The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon takes place in the late 1880s in Excellent, Idaho, where Shed, a bisexual half-Indian, leaves the Indian Head Hotel (populated by whores and their customers), where he grew up, in search of his true identity.
Two brothers who come to Snake Junction, Idaho, from their native Oklahoma find their bond challenged when one of them falls in love with an older woman, in Finding Caruso by Kim Barnes. Barnes also wrote In the Wilderness: Coming of Age in Unknown Country, a moving memoir of growing up in a fundamentalist Christian family in the Idaho logging camps. Here’s one of my favorite quotations from the memoir, illustrating Barnes’s difficult upbringing:“[My mother] professed to be the only one among her friends who knew how to raise children because she alone told children the truth. ‘I have always loathed your father, Kim, and have no idea why I’m alive.’ Later on, she explained, these truths would be the handles by which I would grasp reality.”
I love the cover of King of the Mild Frontier: An Ill-Advised Autobiography by Chris Crutcher, which pictures the author as a buck- and gap-toothed kid grinning goofily at the camera. Crutcher tells the humorous and heartbreaking story of his formative years in Cascade, Idaho, with an overly demanding father and an alcoholic mother, and with the added burdens of a terrible temper and no athletic ability.
THE IMMIGRANT EXPERIENCE
Books about the immigrant experience have always been popular, whether they’re written in the form of novels or memoirs, whether they’re set in the United States or elsewhere. Here are some that I’ve especially enjoyed, ranging from tales of Scandinavian immigrants arriving on the Great Plains to illegal aliens trying to find safe harbor from their war-torn countries.
One of the earliest novels written about the immigrant experience is O. E. Rolvaag’s 1927 classic Giants in the Earth: A Saga of the Prairie. The Norwegian-born Rolvaag, who became a professor of his native language at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota, himself emigrated to the United States in 1896. His novel follows the lives of a small group of Norwegians as they try, with varying degrees of success, to adjust both physically and psychologically to their new home in South Dakota.
I don’t know that I’ve read any other novel about Maltese immigrants (in this case landing not in America but in Cardiff, Wales) besides Trezza Azzopardi’s The Hiding Place (short-listed for Britain’s prestigious Booker Prize). It’s narrated by Dolores, whose tales of the emotional ups and downs (mostly the latter) of this tragic family read more like a memoir than a novel.
The first relationship that newly arrived Ilka, daughter of parents lost in Hitler’s cauldron of death, finds in America is with Carter Bayoux, a black intellectual, prodigious drinker, and teller of tales, in Lore Segal’s Her First American.
In Harbor, a wrenching first novel by Lorraine Adams, Aziz, a Muslim from Algeria who arrives il
legally in America in the 1990s, becomes caught up in America’s domestic war on terror following 9/11.
At the age of six, Remi is sent from her grandparents’ home in Lagos, Nigeria, to boarding school in England, where she is the only African student, in Simi Bedford’s Yoruba Girl Dancing.
Rachel Calof’s Story: Jewish Homesteader on the Northern Plains is the actual journal of Rachel Calof, who at eighteen left a shtetl in Russia for an arranged marriage in North Dakota. A good companion read for Calof’s book is Willa Cather’s My Ántonia.
Zadie Smith’s first novel, White Teeth, begins with the unlikely friendship between Archibald Jones, who is British, and Samad Iqbal, a Muslim immigrant from Pakistan. It quickly adds their wives and children to the mix, along with a host of other colorful characters.